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WINTERHORDE: “MAESTRO”

Jun 012016

(DGR reviews the new album by the Israeli band Winterhorde.)

In what has become a calling card, Winterhorde are a band for whom significant time has passed between the last two releases. Three years plus tends to be the point at which questions start arising about the band’s status, and when you start coming up on the front-end of six years as in the case of Winterhorde, you start to worry whether the band even still exist. The gap between the releases prior to the six-year breather was closer to four, so even by their standards the length of time between discs was reaching an extreme.

Maestro, the group’s most recent release, follows the group’s 2010 album Underwatermoon — a densely packed album that, while it had some faults in terms of running a little long in the tooth, had its fair share of interesting ideas and regional melodies that gave the whole album an air of maddening ritual. Continue reading »

THE REARVIEW MIRROR (BIOMECHANICAL)

THE REARVIEW MIRROR 5 Responses »

May 292016

(DGR presents this Sunday’s Rearview Mirror installment, reflecting upon the metal of yesteryear.)

I have to confess that there was a moment in writing this when it occurred to me that I was going to have to justify enjoying Biomechanical’s last album. It was an oddly sobering thought, especially in the face of discs like Eight Moons and The Empire Of The Worlds, which are albums it feels like history looks upon more kindly.

The last time I sat down and took over the Rearview Mirror column for a bit, I found myself vouching for the idea of an album that is “half-good” — one of those discs that isn’t the strongest, but half of it really seems to be on to something and for that reason always sticks out in your mind. Since then, I’ve played with a couple of other ideas for Rearview Mirror posts in order to alleviate some of the burden on our glorious editor-person, but the half-good album idea has continued to gnaw at me, at least for another edition. Continue reading »

MURDER MADE GOD: “ENSLAVED”

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May 282016

(DGR reviews the new album by the Greek band Murder Made God.)

There is a part of me that always becomes excited when I feel I’ve somehow gone on an archeological dig and made an incredible world-shifting discovery. Recently, I feel like I’ve found 2016’s brutal death metal common ancestor, or for lack of a better term, that with Murder Made God’s recent April release Enslaved, I have found brutal death metal’s median — the throughline casting its way through the whole genre.

Enslaved marks the Greek brutal death metal horde’s second release of their career, with its predecessor Irreverance having hit in late June of 2013. Enslaved, which is out via Comatose Music, sounds like it took a look at the brutal death genre, saw the various directions in which it has been splitting off recently — from the hyperblasting sect to the gorier subsections — and decided instead to shoot directly down the center. Continue reading »

IN MOURNING: “AFTERGLOW”

Album Reviews 6 Responses »

May 242016

(DGR reviews the new album by Sweden’s In Mourning, with a full album stream at the end.)

On May 20th, In Mourning released the fourth album of their career with Afterglow. To lay all of our cards on the table up front, Afterglow is a great disc — but to really understand how and why Afterglow is great, you need to take a deep dive into In Mourning’s history so you can see what led the band to this point, because the album feels like the most natural evolution of their sound yet.

In Mourning are one of those bands for whom each album has sounded different from the others. A few genres have combined over the years to define their sound, and one of those key tenets has been a large swath of Euro-doom. The album that sowed the seeds of that was their first release, 2008’s Shrouded Divine. Shrouded Divine is also the disc where the group’s reputation as something of a critical darling was launched, drawing comparisons to bands such as Opeth — likely due to the occasional clean-sung break the group snuck in and the prevelant melo-death sound that wormed its way throughout Shrouded Divine’s run. Continue reading »

REVIEWS: NOVEMBRE (“URSA”) AND OCTOBER TIDE (“WINGED WALTZ”)

Reviews 2 Responses »

May 172016

(DGR brings us a dual review of two gloomy albums released in April, by Italy’s Novembre and Sweden’s October Tide.)

The month of April has proven to be rather interesting if you are a fan of a very specific, European-flavored branch of melancholic doom metal. Sometimes referred to as melo-doom — for lack of a better short-term genre-naming — and other times described as being ethereal, this branch has seen something of an explosion in recent years. One of the results has been the re-formation of quite a few acts, and April has brought us releases by two of them, one that has effectively been re-formed for some time and one that is returning after a nine-year hiatus.

Coincidentally, both groups also happen to be named after months themselves, with Novembre releasing their come-back album Ursa on April 1st and October Tide released their third post-revival album, Winged Waltz, on April 22nd. Long story short: If you happen to inhabit the incredibly weird niche of being a fan of the prettier side of doom and also a huge fan of months and stupid coincidences, holy shit was April the month for you. Continue reading »

AN NCS PREMIERE: WINTERHORDE — “WORMS OF SOUL”

Premieres 2 Responses »

May 162016

(We are fortunate to bring you a premiere of a song from the new album Maestro by the Israeli collective known as Winterhorde, with the following introduction by our writer DGR.)

The passage of time tends to make all of us look insane, because when you consider the sheer numbers, a gap of six years between albums looks pretty tremendous. Six years lies pretty far over on the longer side of the “waiting for a new disc” listener spectrum. Yes, so much happens in metal that you almost don’t notice, save for when all of a sudden bands dramatically reappear and drop new albums on us, seemingly out of nowhere.

Winterhorde are one such band, an Israeli symphonic-black metal band whose last album Underwatermoon was released in 2010 — an album which I praised in part because it had the temerity to feature both a boat and a planet on its cover, in a year where it seemed like eighty percent of metal releases either had a boat or a planet as their art. Continue reading »

WILTING AWAY, BLOODRED, THE NEOLOGIST

Album Reviews 1 Response »

May 102016

(We applied the squeeze to DGR and he coughed up not one, not two, but three reviews all at once…)

I’ve actually been taking a quick breather from the giant review slate that I’ve built up for myself at this lovely site. After the humongous swath of death metal (with a handful of releases to go, as well) and some upcoming more doom-flavored tracks, I figured I’d pull away from the names I’d recognized and try to find some stuff that we’ve never really crossed paths with before. One of the ways I’ll do that is to go fishing through our various social media contacts, because although there is a gigantic pile of music to work through, I’ve had pretty good luck in finding stuff.

Even though an absolute torrent of new releases is coming our way here over the next few months, I occasionally like to go back and sift through earlier releases to see if there is anything interesting that we missed. Often, it has usually boiled down to me surfing through our various messages to see if there have been any bands who have contacted us recently, and among the few of us at the site we start slowly filtering our way through them. So yes, this process does seem to take forever but it is also because I like to deep-dive into most things, rather than take a cursory glance at it and give it the up vote/down vote scenario.

That’s the case with this collection of music, as I found myself getting yanked and driven all over the globe. In this particular roundup, I have two bands that we’ve never covered before and one that should be intensely familiar to very seasoned NCS readers, but three very different styles of music on top of that. Let us charge forth, shall we? Continue reading »

NECROSAVANT: “ANIARA MMXIV”

Album Reviews 5 Responses »

May 022016

(We’re late reviewing the very impressive debut album of Necrosavant, but DGR does his best to make up for the delay with this extensive review.)

Sometimes reviews start out as entirely different beasts from the ones that are eventually published. You close your eyes and start typing — in my case usually to discover that your fingers were off to the left by just one letter after about a paragraph — and the next thing you know your opening segment has spent more time talking about other projects that a band might be involved in than the release you were initially focused on. This review has one such lineage, starting out as one for In Mourning, before shifting to October Tide, before finally becoming a review for Necrosavant.

Believe it or not, there actually is a throughline for those three releases. The initially wild and wooly paragraph that opened up this monster would’ve taken you on a journey ’round the world before landing on why those three are tied together somewhat. Instead, it came down to the fact that although our site posted about the Necrosavant kickstarter way back when it launched, and I personally was on pins and needles hoping to see it succesful (based on a one-minute sample video of guest vocalist Tobias Netzell (In Mourning, Antarktis) delivering a monstrous vocal performance), we actually never got around to talking about the whole album after its end-of-February release through Kolony Records came and went. The time has come. Continue reading »

ABNORMALITY: “MECHANISMS OF OMNISCIENCE”

Reviews 6 Responses »

Apr 282016

(DGR reviews the new album by Boston’s Abnormality.)

For a long time Abnormality were one of my pocket bands to always recommend to everyone whenever people were having their death metal offs, sharing their most brutal bands, their quickest groups, the ones they felt more people needed to hear. Abnormality have always been a good hybrid of those three reasons, and hence always ended up with me asking if people had heard of them: They were quick, brutal, and I honestly felt that they got better with each release and that more people needed to hear them.

Abnormality are a five-piece whirling machine of brutal death metal hailing from Massachusetts. They’ve been around for some time now, with a demo that hit in 2007 and two other releases to their name — a fantastic EP known as The Collective Calm In Mortal Oblivion, and an equally awesome album in Contaminating The Hive Mind. When news came out that Metal Blade had picked up the band for their most recent release, Mechanisms Of Omniscience, there was a sense that someone had finally gotten the hint. Continue reading »

REVIEWS: THE ZENITH PASSAGE (“SOLIPSIST”) AND OMOPHAGIA (“IN THE NAME OF CHAOS”)

Album Reviews 2 Responses »

Apr 182016

(DGR delivers a two-fer… reviewing the new albums by California’s The Zenith Passage and Omophagia from Zurich.)

If you’re a fan of the modern tech-death scene — the one in which tech-death has evolved into its own shorthand moniker to represent an entire genre as opposed to just a way to describe complicated death metal — then last week should have proved to be pretty big for you, as Unique Leader had two releases hitting right in the same window.

The label, which has specialized in a brand of tech-death that is equal parts technical and groove-focused, has spread out quite a bit in the past few years and has become increasingly prolific, to the point where they’ve actually developed something of their own sound. You could say, “Unique Leader tech-death” to some people, and they would have a pretty good starting point as to whatever bands you’d be describing at that moment. While the label has always delved heavily into the California scene (at one point seeming like they were sweeping through the Bay-Area-to-Sacramento run especially), recent years have also seen the label adding quite a few international acts to the mix — which brings us to this point.

Last week brought two fairly big Unique Leader releases, one of which is the first full-length release for So-Cal-based The Zenith Passage and the other the second album (after a five-year wait) for Swiss death metal proprietors Omophagia. As such, I felt it might be interesting to slam the two albums into one big review package, because both of them by their nature feel like two takes on the same subject — two differing styles of death metal but with one very solid throughline between them. Continue reading »

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